If Only etc. eBook

IF ONLY.

CHAPTER I.

There is a vast deal talked in the present day about
Freewill. We like to feel that we are independent
agents and are ready to overlook the fact that our
surroundings and circumstances and the hundred and
one subtle and mysterious workings of the fate we can
none of us escape, control our actions and are responsible
for our movements, and make us to a great extent what
we are.

A man is not even a free agent when he takes the most
important step of his whole life, and marries a wife.
He is impelled to it by considerations outside of
himself; it affects not only his own present and future,
but that of others, very often, and he must be guided
accordingly.

Emerson says; “The soul has inalienable rights,
and the first of these is love,” but he does
not say marriage. Love is the business of the
idle and the idleness of the busy, but marriage is
quite another affair—­a grave matter, and
not to be undertaken lightly, since it is the one
step that can never be retraced, save through the unsavoury
channels of shame and notoriety, or death itself.

But perhaps Jack Chetwynd was hampered with fewer
restraining influences than most men, for he was alone
in the world, without kith or kin, and might be fairly
allowed to please himself, and pleasing himself in
this case meant leading to the altar, or rather to
the Registry Office, Miss Bella Blackall, music-hall
singer and step dancer.

It was unquestionably a case of love at first sight.
The girl was barely seventeen, and her girlishness
attracted him quite as much as her beauty, which was
exceptional. There was nothing meretricious about
it, for as yet she owed nothing to art—­brown
hair, warm lips, soft blue eyes, and a complexion
like the leaf of a white rose—­a woman blossom.
Then, too, she was a happy creature, full of life and
happiness and bubbling over with childish merriment—­no
one could help liking her, he told himself, but it
was something warmer than that. What makes the
difference between liking and love? It is so
little and yet so much. There was an air of refinement
about her, too, which to his fancy seemed to protest
against the vulgarities of her surroundings.
He thought he could discern the stuff that meant an
actress in her, and prophesied that she would before
long be playing Juliet at the Haymarket. He was
still at the age when the habit is to discover geniuses
in unlikely places, especially when the women are
pretty. He raved about her when he adjourned with
his companions to the bar, and they chaffed him a
good deal to his face and sneered at him behind his
back. He was there the next night, and the night,
after and by-and-by he managed to get introduced to
her.

She was prettier off the stage than on, and her manner
was charming, and her voice delicious with its racy
accent.